Surprise sample leads to champion result

Garry Paddison had no idea he was in the running for a major agricultural show accolade, let alone that he had won it, when a phone call from a mate delivered a surprise of a lifetime. The Parkes farmer was named Champion Barley Grower at the Sydney Royal Easter Show this year after his friend Barry Unger collected a sample of barley from Garry’s farm and entered it in the state-wide competition - without telling him. Garry only discovered his barley had taken out the top honour when Barry called to break the news. Apart from entering in the Parkes Show last year because stewards were looking for more grain samples, Garry has otherwise never been involved in a competition before. The win is not only an extremely special personal achievement for Garry, but a real credit to all the hard work, care and consistency our region’s farmers put into every season - not just in the good years, but the tougher ones too. Garry and his wife Joy said it’s a great reflection of the quality of grain being produced within the Parkes Shire. “We were in harvest (last year) and what actually happened was one of the guys that was carting for us must have been talking to Barry and said ‘Garry Paddison’s got an exceptional quality barley and we’re delivering it to the subterminal’ - because it was weighing so heavy,” Garry said. “It really was a nice table of barley. It actually took the truck drivers a little bit by surprise. “They all got breaches when they first went in there, because they were filling their trucks up as normal to height for barley and then it was weighing more like wheat.” Garry wasn’t home at the time when Barry rang asking if he could call-in to “get some barley”. “I truly didn't even know what he wanted it for, he didn't explain,” Garry said. He told him to help himself to whatever he needed, thinking maybe Barry might have wanted some grain to grow. “I never gave it another thought,” Garry said. “Then [come] the Easter Show, Barry rings me and says ‘that barley sample I got from you… You've just won first prize at Sydney Royal’. “The next day he rings me back, he said ‘not only did you win first prize, you've actually won champion’. “It was a huge surprise… he was tickled pink that I was so tickled pink,” he laughed. Garry is aware of the amount of work that goes into preparing a sample for competitions like Sydney Royal, and “getting it right”. “[Barry] would have spent hours on it,” he said. “Although it's gone through a header, he’ll take that sample and put it in a cement mixer. He’ll fill the cement mixer up and throw, say a bucket full of rocks or something in with it, and it sort of polishes the seed, knocks the husk and any little tips off it. “He’ll run it over another sieve so that all the bigger seeds stay behind.” Barry, who’s been volunteering and involved with Sydney Royal since he was 17, said he also at times handpicks the bad seeds out of a bucket of grain - just like his father Gerald Unger, a world champion oat grower, did before him - to get the best sample possible to showcase. He said Garry’s barley sample was the best he’d seen in 15 or more years. When it was tested at GrainCorp the results were BAR1: typical sample protein was 11.1, it weighed 72.8kg/hL, retention 93.9 and screening 3.9. The story behind Garry’s and his family’s life on the land has made his win all the more special – a story that is particularly rare and that had been paused for 32 years. He was a farmer mostly when he was in school in the 70s but the family lost their farm in 1986 when interest rates went from 10 to 26 per cent. Garry never lost his ties to the land working in agriculture with numerous businesses and moved around, including living in far north Queensland. He and Joy started their own agricultural business in 2000 in Parkes. “We managed to buy the family farm, the original block back in 2018,” he said. “We sold the business we had in town… and it just so happened this place came up for sale a few months later… [which] is very rare.” For Garry it was unfinished business. And just eight years later, Garry has produced champion quality barley. His crop was cyclops barley, a reasonably new variety he’s been growing for a couple of years now. “We went for cyclops, it's a little bit shorter in the straw and it seemed to yield pretty well when I had a look at it,” he said. Garry attributed his excellent crop yield to not only great seasonal conditions and rainfall, but the right nutrition at the right time. “We sowed it on 16 May last year at 65kg of barley seed, and with that we had 80kg of MAP, plus 50kg of urea went down with the seed,” he said. “Typically I like to feed barley. If I'm going to pop-dress it again, I want to do it early. So six weeks later there must have been a rain event coming - we like to spread urea just prior to rain so we put 100kg per hectare of urea on it then left it.” Urea is a concentrated, high-nitrogen fertiliser that stimulates growth. “Some will feed the barley later, but I like to feed it earlier, and just let it do its thing then,” Garry added. “Plus Joy likes to go walking every day and she talks to the crop,” he laughed. Garry’s barley crop the previous year was pretty exceptional as well, he said. In 2025 the crop yield averaged 6.8 tons to the hectare. In 2024 it averaged a little better at 7.42 tons. “Which is huge,” Garry said. Garry wanted to say a big thank you to Barry for going to all the effort he did preparing and entering his barley sample into the Sydney Royal Show competition.